Standard and Poor’s reported that the November data for the Case-Shiller Home Price Index indicated further declines, the 20-city index falling 1.3 percent for the second straight month as property values declined in 19 of the 20 cities, also for the second month in a row. On a year-over-year basis, the 20-city index is now down 3.7 percent.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, home prices were down only 0.7 percent with three cities seeing gains and David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Indices, was not hopeful when he noted the following:

Despite continued low interest rates and better real GDP growth in the fourth quarter, home prices continue to fall … The trend is down and there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand.

It looks like policy makers in Washington might want to accelerate plans for the next attempt at rescuing the housing market, that is, before prices fall too much further.

I’m not around at the moment to comment on the results of today’s FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) meeting that concluded a few minutes ago, likely to have resulted in some sort of announcement about the central bank’s communication policy and an enhanced economic/policy forecast, but, when I’m able to catch up on this and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke’s press conference, I’ll try to put something up later in the day.

Based on what I’ve been reading about an extension of the Fed’s freakishly low interest rate guarantee, we’re probably looking at the situation to right.

This is not going to make savers happy, but, if you like to borrow money, you’re likely to get lower rates for a while longer.

Come to think of it, those low-rate credit card offers could be arriving in our mailboxes for the rest of the decade.

Anyway, I’m hoping that someone asks Bernanke about the 2006 FOMC meeting transcripts and how the nation’s brightest economists could have been guffawing all year long when they maybe should have been looking at the rapidly inflating housing bubble that would burst a year or two later.

Following yesterday’s generally well received diatribe about the shortcomings of the world’s economists, this Time Magazine commentary was stumbled upon that makes some of the same points, absent what I thought were important references to The Shining.

After the financial crisis of 2008, the Queen of England asked economists, “Why did no one see the credit crunch coming?” Three years later, a group of Harvard under­graduate students walked out of introductory economics and wrote, “Today, we are walking out of your class, ­Economics 101, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.”

What has happened? Rebellion from both above and below suggests that economists, who were recently at the core of power and social leadership in our society, are no longer trusted. Not long ago, the principal theories of economics appeared to be the secular religion of society. Today, economics is a discipline in disrepute.
…
First, economists should resist overstating what they actually know.
…Second, economists have to recognize the shortcomings of high-powered mathematical models, which are not substitutes for vigilant observation. Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow saw this danger years ago when he exclaimed, “The math takes on a life of its own because the mathematics pushed toward a tendency to prove theories of mathematical, rather than scientific, interest.”

Financial-market models, for instance, tend to be constructed with building blocks that assume stable and anchored expectations. But the long history of financial crises over the past 200 years belies that notion.

And that is why few economists saw the financial crisis coming – because they had their noses buried in models that failed to properly reflect what was happening in the real world.

I’ll never forget former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan’s remarks before Congress in 2004 or 2005 when he said there was virtually no stress in the banking system when, at the time, the real action was in the now-defunct “shadow banking” system.

After reading through some of the recently released transcripts from the 2006 Federal Reserve policy meetings, it occurred to me for about the thousandth time that economists are particularly ill-suited to oversee an economy where the financial system is, from time to time, run by psychopaths each trying to one-up the other.

During normal times, economists’ models of how the world works seem to function reasonably well, but when a multi-decade orgy of money and credit creation came to a head a few years back, they were completely unaware of how badly some people were acting and how contagious this was.

The central bank meets this week and is expected to revamp how they communicate their thinking about monetary policy to the world, but, maybe they should spend more time figuring out how to better observe what’s going on in the world – looking beyond the charts, tables, and models that they had their noses buried in back in 2006, oblivious to the looming crisis in housing and credit markets.

It was all there to see for anyone willing to make a modest effort to get out into the real world and look around.

Wild-eyed buyers lined up for blocks to buy new condos and mortgage brokers with barely a high school education were raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in commissions by peddling all kinds of “exotic” mortgages to borrowers who, in many cases, didn’t really understand what they were signing.

As we’ve come to find out, there was a good deal of fraud involved here by both lenders and borrowers as few seemed to care about how their individual actions might affect others in the fullness of time.

You might say that a good asset bubble brings out the psychopath in many of us.